Verizon and New Jersey Agree 4G Service Equivalent to Broadband Internet 155
An anonymous reader writes with news that Verizon and New Jersey regulators have reached a deal releasing Verizon from their obligation to have brought 45Mbps broadband to all NJ residents by 2010. Instead, 4G wireless service is considered sufficient. From the article:
"2010 came and went and a number of rural parts of the state are still living with dial-up or subpar DSL. And even though the original deal was made in the days of modems and CompuServe, its crafters had the foresight to define broadband as 45Mbps, which is actually higher than many Verizon broadband customers receive today. ... In spite of that, and the thousands of legitimate complaints from actual New Jersey residents, the BPU voted unanimously yesterday to approve a deal with Verizon ... According to the Bergen Record, Verizon will no longer be obligated to provide broadband to residents if they have access to broadband service from cable TV providers or wireless 4G service. ... Residents who happen to live in areas not served by cable or wireless broadband can petition Verizon for service, but can only get broadband if at least 35 people in a single census tract each agree to sign contracts for a minimum of one year and pay $100 deposits."
Give Back The Money (Score:4, Informative)
Verizon was given a shit load of cash in tax breaks, rate hikes, etc in return for providing 45Mb broadband to all state residents.
Re:Democracy at work (Score:0, Informative)
I'm getting really tired of this shitty argument. We currently have a system in which rich people and corporations can donate nearly unlimited amounts of money to all political candidates, essentially buying them all out and you insist that the problem is with the voters. When every candidate is bought, there is no one left representing US! Stop acting like there is always a perfect candidate and somehow we pick the wrong one 100% of the time.
Hey, don't leave out the public employee unions. They buy pols, too.
Re:How? (Score:5, Informative)
Except you, the taxpayer already paid that amount to Verizon to run fiber/HSI to your house back in the 90's and 00's. Verizon already cashed the check a long time ago -- they just didn't provide the service.
Re:Technically, it is (Score:4, Informative)
There's no technical reason that good LTE coverage isn't going to give you a broadband experience. I've got 50/10 meg VDSL2, and three-bar LTE coverage provides similar downstream and way more upstream.
The problem, then, isn't the technology itself. The problem is the 1GB data cap and $15/GB overage fees. My VDSL2 connection comes with 300GB of data, on an LTE connection that'd cost me $4,500 a month. At those prices, even if LTE is capable of acting as broadband, you can't use it as such.
Well, there is one Technical reason -- the same reason that limits every wireless protocol -- there is a limited amount of frequency spectrum available to wireless signals, which puts a cap on the aggregate bandwidth available. Multiple sectors and channels can help, but it's still not the same as wireless -- just like how 300Mbit 802.11n Wifi in the office doesn't give everyone the same quality of service as 100mbit wired connections -- it's great when only a few people are using the Wifi, but when everyone tries to use the fileserver at once, they all have to share the same bandwidth.
Wired infrastructure is also aggregated and shared on the back end, but there are fewer limitations on available bandwidth since the fiber backhaul has a lot more capacity than the limited RF bandwidth available to carriers. Increasing LTE capacity often means installing a new cell site so each site serves fewer users, which can take years from planning to implementation. In comparison, adding additional wired backhaul capacity is often as easy as lighting up another fiber strand (or using faster transceivers).
Turn-based gaming (Score:4, Informative)
The only advantage DSL had was that you could game on it, but that was about it. [...] 4G and Sat are almost equally laggy for gaming
A high-latency connection works fine for games so long as they're turn-based instead of twitch-based. Moving also works, though I grant its impracticality for many.